The Price of Time

Before the clock there were no hours to sell. A medieval ploughman did not work an eight-hour day or a twelve-hour one; he worked until the field was sown or the light was gone, and the length of his labor was set by the task and the season, not by a number on a dial. Time, where it was reckoned at all, was reckoned against the things of life — an egg boiled for the space of a Pater Noster, a journey ran from cockcrow to noon. What mattered was whether the work was done, not how long it had taken, and the two were not yet the same thing.

This was not idleness; it was a wholly different relation to time — what one historian named task-orientation, in which the shape of the day follows the work to be done rather than the clock.¹1E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’ Past & Present 38 (1967) — the classic account of the passage from task-orientation to labour measured by the clock. Its rhythm was uneven by our lights, hard bouts of work broken by long idle ones, and it had a feature we have wholly lost: when the task was finished, the day was finished. No one was owed a surplus hour, because no one was buying hours. A man was paid, if he was paid in coin at all, for the sheaves he bound or the cloth he wove — by the piece, by the thing, by the job. The wage by time did not exist, because the thing it would one day sell did not exist.

That thing had to be invented, and it was invented, of all places, in the monastery. The Benedictine houses of early medieval Europe had bound themselves to a rule, and the rule required prayer at fixed points of the day and night — the canonical hours, from matins before dawn to compline at dusk. To keep them, a community could not depend on a single monk watching the sky; so the houses built mechanisms to ring a bell at the appointed times, and timekeeping in the West became, for the first time, regular, communal, and announced aloud.²2Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), on the Benedictine origin of regular timekeeping and the clock as ‘the key-machine of the modern industrial age.’ On the medieval work-bell, or Werkglocke, see Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980).

From the cloister the bell came down into the town. Across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries mechanical clocks rose in the towers of European cities, striking the hours over the marketplace as they had struck them over the choir — and what they summoned was no longer only prayer. The same instrument that had called monks to matins came to call laborers to work and to send them home: the Werkglocke, the work-bell, that fixed when a weaver’s day began and when it might end. The clock, Lewis Mumford would argue — not the steam-engine — was the key machine of the industrial age: the first whose product was neither cloth nor grain but time, counted out in identical units. Eternity had been the monk’s measure; the hour became the merchant’s. The hour, like the just price before it, was born in the cloister.

But a bell that strikes the hours is not yet a market in them. For time to be bought and sold it had first to become a quantity — uniform, divisible, the same everywhere and always. Here the clock did something subtler than ring: it made the hours equal. The hours people had kept before were seasonal hours, the daylight cut into twelve parts whatever the length of the day, so that an hour of June was longer than an hour of December, and an hour of daylight longer than an hour of night. Such hours could be lived by; they could not be priced, for you cannot set a fixed rate on a unit that swells and shrinks with the calendar. The mechanical clock swept the seasonal hour away and put the equal hour in its place — and only then was there a measure of time to which a wage could be fixed.³3On the seasonal or ‘temporal’ hours — daylight divided into twelve parts that lengthened and shrank across the year — giving way to the uniform equal hour of the mechanical clock: Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour (1996).

With the equal hour, labor could at last be sold as cloth was sold: so much measured quantity, at a price. The man once paid for the sheaves he bound became the man paid for the hours he gave, and the question of the wage shifted under everyone’s feet. It was no longer what is this work worth, but what is an hour of this man worth — and an hour, unlike a task, has no natural end. Benjamin Franklin drew the moral with a tradesman’s bluntness in 1748: remember, he wrote, that time is money. He that could earn ten shillings in a day and sat idle half of it had not merely lost his ease; he had thrown away five shillings he might have had.⁴4Benjamin Franklin, ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’ (1748): ‘Remember that time is money.’ Idle time is reckoned, for the first time, as wages thrown away. Once time was money, to rest was to spend.

Work had been a thing you finished. Now it was a thing you spent.

Once the wage was paid by the hour, everything turned on how many hours there were. The task had set its own limit; the clock set none. In the first factories the working day stretched to fill whatever the engine and the gaslight allowed — ten hours, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, six days in the week, with children at the looms beside their mothers. The wall that dusk and exhaustion had once placed around labor was gone, and in its absence the length of the day became the bitterest question of the age.

The answer, when it came, came against the market rather than from it. As early as 1817 the millowner Robert Owen, sickened by what the factories had made of the people inside them, set the demand in three equal parts — eight hours’ labor, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest — and the figure became a banner carried for a hundred years. The law followed by inches: the Ten Hours Act of 1847, the long agitation of the eight-hour leagues, and at last, in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which fixed the American week at forty hours and ruled that an hour beyond them must be paid at one and a half — a century and more after Owen had named the number.⁵5Robert Owen’s demand of 1817 — ‘eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest’; the Factory (Ten Hours) Act of 1847; the United States’ eight-hour movement; and the forty-hour week and overtime premium of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. On the working day itself, Karl Marx, Capital I, ch. 10. The day was given a wall again, and this time the wall was written into statute: past a certain hour a worker’s time became his own once more, and an employer who wanted it had to pay a penalty to reach across the line.

The clock-wage was never only one thing; from the worker’s side it had always worn two faces. It was a cage. It was the bell that opened the day and shut it, the timesheet, the foreman docking a quarter-hour for a late arrival; and in time it was the stopwatch of Frederick Taylor, who turned the clock inward to measure not merely the hours a man was bought for but the motions within them, so that even the seconds inside the hour might be made to give up their yield.⁶6Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) — the stopwatch, which turned the clock from a measure of the hours bought into a measure of the labour packed inside them. To be paid by time is to have one’s time owned, minute by counted minute. It is the discipline every worker has resented.

And yet the very thing that made the hour a cage made it also a wall. A quantity that can be counted can be bounded; a day with a measured length has, by that fact, an end. The clock that told a man his time belonged to his master after the morning bell told him, with the same precision, that it belonged to himself after the evening one. The overtime rate went further still: it put a price on the boundary itself, made the employer pay more to cross it, and so turned the edge of the working day into something the law would stand and defend. The hour disciplined; but the hour also protected. What the worker resented as a cage was, seen from the other side, the wall that kept the work on its own side of the door.

The hour was a cage. But the cage had a wall — and the wall faced both ways.

That wall is the thing we are now losing, and we are losing it from both ends at once. At the top of the labor market the salaried professional carries the office in his pocket: the message arrives at eleven at night and an answer is expected by morning, and because he is paid by the year and not by the hour, no clock marks where his time stops being his employer’s. At the bottom the gig worker is paid exactly as the ploughman was — by the task, by the ride, by the delivery, by the piece — and the protections the long fight had bolted onto the hourly wage do not reach him, because he has no hours to protect. At both ends the world is sliding back toward task-time: work measured again by what is done, not by how long it takes.

But it is task-time stripped of the one mercy the old task-time carried — the natural wall, the fallen dark and the finished field, that told a man his day was over. The medieval laborer owned no hours, yet when the task was done he was free; the modern worker owns no hours either, and the task is never done, because the device in his pocket can always furnish another. We spent five centuries learning to sell our time, and one hard century learning to fence it, and now, the fence dissolved, we find we have kept the selling and lost the bound. It is no accident that France, in 2017, judged it necessary to write into law a right to disconnect — a right, in plain words, to be permitted to stop.⁷7France’s droit à la déconnexion — the ‘right to disconnect’ — enacted in the El Khomri labour law (Law No. 2016-1088, art. 55) and in force from 1 January 2017: the bounded day re-erected, against the always-on device, by statute. The wall the eight-hour movement won with marches, a later age must try to win back with a law against the telephone.